Florida Film Festival 2014 food films and events

The foodie offerings at this year’s feast look tasty

This year’s FFF has toned down the food element considerably from previous years, retaining just vestiges of past events: the chef-heavy panel discussions, the multiple special dinners and parties, the food-themed film programs. That said, 2014’s slimmed-down offerings look tasty.

Kicking things off on the first Saturday of the festival, Locally Fresh! combines a short film about some of our local farmers and food producers with a tasting of their goods, and winds up with an actual farmers market on the Enzian lawn. It’s not the usual panel discussion, but it’s a fair bet that representatives of Lake Meadow Natural Farms, Palmetto Creek Farms, Olde Hearth Bread Co. and/or East End Market, all featured in the video presentation, will be on hand to chat. (film and tasting 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m., farmers market noon-2:30 p.m. Saturday, April 5, at Enzian)

This year’s Italian Cinema Night, a longtime favorite dinner-and-a-movie party, offers a screening of Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. This twisty cat-and-mouse thriller won the 1971 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and it’s heady and challenging fare, paired with a less challenging spread from Buca di Beppo. You may be relieved and happy to retreat into a simple meatball-topped spaghetti with red sauce after Petri’s suspenseful mindfuck. (6:30 p.m. film, 8-9:30 p.m. tasting Monday, April 7, at Enzian)

Although you could make the argument that FFF 2014’s opening night film, The Trip to Italy, is a “food film” – consisting as it does of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon traveling around Italy, bickering and eating – the fest has just one narrative feature, one documentary and one short overtly categorized as food films this year. First up we have After Winter, Spring (4:15 p.m. Saturday, April 5, at Regal Winter Park Village), a lyrical documentary about the Périgord region of France, a part of the world that has been continuously cultivated by farmers for more than 5,000 years. Preceding it is a three-minute doc on Cajun heritage foodways, Faces From Places–Louisiana: La Boucherie. Doing a 180 on tone, Le Chef is a fun French farce starring Jean Reno (The Professional) as a three-star classical chef coasting on his reputation confronted by a changing culinary world and young, hungry kitchen challengers. (12:30 p.m. Sunday, April 6, at Regal Winter Park Village)